On 08/08/2013 06:15 PM, Alan Evans wrote: > The problem with 'routers' as far as ISPs are concerned is that they are a > HUGE variable. > > 1. There are hundreds/thousands of models. > 2. Joe consumer has a very low level of understanding, he plugged it in > and popped the CD into his Laptop and it magically worked. > 3. There are any number of failure scenarios. > a. Incorrect wiring > b. Bad cabling > i. customer ran over it w/ wheels of a chair for the last year > ii. abused cable ends > iii. interference/noise > c. If wireless > i. bad antenna/device placement > ii. authentication problems > iii. interference (neighbours, 2.4GHz phones etc etc) > d. mis-configuration > e. on and on
Oh I agree. And usually lying is the best policy. And no, nothing I do with a "real computer" is likely to change that! The ISPs tech support is still going to try to do as little as possible. I guess this incident has just given me the impetus to finally upgrade my internal network a bit, something I've wanted to do for a long time. My little old router is more than 5 years old, and it's getting tired anyway, especially now that the bulk of my house network is gigabit. In my case, though, having a nice little powerful computer allows me to do several things at the router level: - powerful enough to run DansGuardian (currently that's on a separate little underpowered Arm device and requires some hacking on the router) - continuously monitor my ISPs connectivity directly at the router leve - track bandwidth and latency - give me much more confidence that the problem is elsewhere - even let me run firefox on it to test some services that my local network setup might be interfering with (proxies, etc) - separates wifi from the router, which means I no longer have to worry about having a special hackable router to do weird things like proxying, vpns, special routes, etc - local DNS (real DNS, not just dnsmasq) I used to do this sort of thing with an old PC, but now I can do it with a powerful PC that's completely silent and uses relatively little power. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
